Sometime back in the 1990s, when the culture wars were the only ones we
thought we had going, a cartoon showed three coworkers viewing each other with
narrowed and questioning eyes. "Those whites don't know how to deal with a
competent black man," the black man is thinking. "Those guys don't
know how to deal with a powerful woman," the woman is thinking. And what
could the only white male have been thinking? "They don't like me. They
know that I'm gay."

So far as we know, there are no gays in the mixture today, but the cartoon
nicely captures what the Democrats face as they try to wage a political war in
the age of correctness, which is, they are finding, an impossibility. The
Democrats are the party of self-conscious inclusion, of identity politics, of
sensitivity training, of hate crimes, hate speech, and of rules to control
them. A presidential campaign, on the other hand, is nothing but "hate
speech," as opponents dive deep into opposition research, fling charges
true, half-true, and simply made up against one another in an attempt to
present their rivals as slimy, dishonest, disreputable, dangerous, and possibly
the worst human beings who ever drew breath.

This has been true of this country's politics since at least 1800, when John
Adams and Thomas Jefferson were vilified roundly, and has gone on ever
since--an accepted and even a much-loved tradition. Until recently, it went on
without murmur, as all the main contestants for president were white Anglo-Saxon
Protestant males, with the exception of Michael Dukakis and three Roman
Catholics, two of whom looked like WASPs. Now, however, in its campaign season
from hell, the party of sensitivity has found itself in a head-banging brawl between
a black man and white woman, each of them visibly loathing the other, in a
situation in which anything said in opposing one of the candidates can be
defined as hateful, insensitive, hurtful, demeaning, not to say bigoted, and,
worst of all, mean. Looking ahead to the general election, Democrats were
prepared to describe any critique made of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton as an
example of the racism and sexism that they like to believe permeates the
Republican universe. But this was before their own race became quite so close,
and so spirited. They never seem to have stopped to think what might occur if
they turned their sensitivity bludgeons against one another. They are now
finding out.

Exhibit A is Bill Clinton, our first (white) black president, who lit into
Obama in time-honored fashion, denouncing the Illinois senator's claim to antiwar purity
as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." That this was
"hateful" (as well as mean and insensitive) was quickly made clear.
"For him to go after Obama using 'fairy tale,' calling him a 'kid.' ...
It's an insult," said Donna Brazile, the long-time (black) Democratic
political operative, who helped manage the Gore campaign in 2000. "I find
his words and tone to be very depressing," she said. Other black
politicians called the comment "a mistake," "unfortunate,"
and an act of ingratitude, as blacks had been the ex-president's most reliable
defenders in his scandal-wracked hour of need.

Bill had barely followed the lead of Don Imus in bending a
knee to the Reverend Al Sharpton when Hillary herself came under assault for
suggesting that President Lyndon B. Johnson might have had something to do with
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was taken as a denigration of the
historical role of Martin Luther King and led to similar charges of
insensitivity. This is what would be referred to in a different context as a
"chilling effect." As John Fund wrote in Opinion Journal, the
Clintons were warned "that they will have to tread carefully in going
after Barack Obama" by James Clyburn, third-ranking House Democrat and a
political powerhouse in South Carolina, where both Obama and Clinton are
courting black votes. "Mr. Clyburn told the New York Times he was
deeply disappointed at comments the Clintons
made that he said diminished the role of African Americans in the civil rights
struggle." Fund concluded: "The bottom line is that Team Clinton has
been put on notice that hard-nosed campaign tactics against Mr. Obama will have
to be carefully weighed against the potential risks they pose. Were Mr. Clyburn
to endorse Barack Obama ... the impact on the race in South Carolina would be immense."

At the same time, Team Obama was being put on notice, this time by Hillary's
feminist backers, who made it clear they would not tolerate having males of any
hue look down on their favorite candidate. Some observers trace his loss in New Hampshire to the
exchange in which he assured Hillary Clinton that she was "likeable
enough," a slap that feminists thought was a perfect example of male
condescension, and of two boys (Barack and John Edwards) ganging up on one
girl. To Eleanor Clift, it was "reminiscent of the Anita Hill
hearings," an "all-male inquisition" of a helpless lone female
that drove women everywhere into frenzies of vengeance. "Many don't like
Hillary ... but when the guys start piling on ... the tribal impulses kick
in," Clift tells us, quoting sensitivity maven Deborah Tannen as saying
"gender is fundamental to how we order the world, more fundamental than
race." Ever since she endorsed Obama in Iowa, Oprah Winfrey has been deluged with
letters from irate female viewers who accuse her of betraying her sex.

In fact, the question of whether sex or race cuts more deeply may determine
who wins the race. Women are slightly more than half of the electorate
nationwide (somewhat more in the Democrats' primary contests), but they are hardly
monolithic, and not all are open to feminists' pleas. Married women and white
women often go more for Republicans, and Ronald Reagan carried the female vote
in 1984, when Geraldine Ferraro was put on the Democrats' ticket as another
chance to "make history." (The history was made instead by Reagan,
who came within sight of a 50-state landslide, losing only Walter Mondale's
home state, Minnesota,
by less than 4,000 votes.) On the other hand, blacks are just 13 percent of the
population but a near-solid bloc for the Democrats. Add to this the fact that
the party's main interest groups and fundraising machines are heavily tilted to
race-gender concerns, and you have a dynamic in which neither the feminist nor
the civil rights interest is a bloc the party or its nominee can afford to
offend.

Hence the hysterics with which the Obama and Clinton campaigns try to
straddle both worlds. The stirring story of Change that would have accompanied
either the first female or black contender has been undercut by a counternarrative
that places each in a somewhat less flattering light. Hillary Clinton is (to
some people) an inspiring figure trying to shatter the biggest glass ceiling.
But she is also a blue-eyed and (bottle) blonde honky, from privilege, not
above playing the race card, as some of her surrogates now have undoubtedly
done. Barack Obama is also an inspiring figure, Tiger Woods without golf clubs,
the harmonic convergence of Kenya
and Kansas of
which we all dream. But to the sisterhood, he is just another chauvinist swine
in the boys' club, a patriarch-in-waiting who "just doesn't get it,"
an annoying and swaggering ... male.

When the results in New Hampshire came in
way out of line with polls and expectations, some Democrats pointed to the
"Bradley effect" (named for Tom Bradley, the black Los Angeles mayor who lost a 1982 governor's
race in which polls said he was leading). In other words, white voters were
suspected of having lied to pollsters out of shame at their prejudice, and then
voted their sinister hearts in the booth. But these voters were Democrats,
mainly older white women of limited means, a key constituency for the party.
Were some members of the party suggesting that others were racists? Maybe they
were. "Too many of us are still too unwilling to vote for people who are
different than we are," Bill Clinton said in 1993, speaking on behalf of
the inept and Carteresque David Dinkins, suggesting that the only reason New Yorkers
could have for wishing to oust their calamitous mayor was bias against him
because of his color. Now the same slander--with much the same justice--is
being leveled against Clinton's
wife.

For the Clintons,
with their sense of private entitlement running head on into their boomer
assertion of moral enlightenment, all this must come as a shock. As Matt Bai
wrote on the New York Times website, "It must be a kind of
nightmare for both Clintons to be running ... against a talented black man, to
be caught in an existential choice between losing their mythical status in the
black community, or possibly losing to a candidate they feel certain does not
deserve to win." It's all the worse as they are in part the authors of
their own misfortune: "The Clintons
embody the generation that invented identity politics and political
correctness," as Bai informs us, and so sprung the trap on themselves.

They embraced Anita Hill, and her (unproven) story of feminist grievance,
and helped ride it to victory in the Year of the Woman; they promised a cabinet
that "looked like America" (though not quite as much so as George W.
Bush's), hectored opponents of affirmative action, and suggested impeachment
was a device thought up by southern conservatives to punish the Clintons for
having black friends. Now they find themselves unable to criticize a black man
for what they think are legitimate reasons, because they helped to teach people
that criticism is bias in disguise, and they can't complain that their words
have been misinterpreted, because the theory of hate speech maintains that the
listener can project on to words uttered by others whatever motives he wants to
see in them. If he declares himself offended, the listener has the last word.

Add this to the unforeseen clash of two groups who have been told for years
by liberals that they are victims of everyone, and the result is explosive. It
is, David Brooks writes, "a Tom Wolfe novel" beyond even Wolfe's
imagining. "All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity
politics are now being exploited by the Clinton
and Obama campaigns," Brooks continues, "competing to play the victim
... accusing each other of insensitivity ... deliberately misinterpreting each
other's comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally
retrograde. All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against
critics of affirmative action ... and critics of radical feminism ... are now
being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners. ... Every revolution devours
its offspring, and it seems that the multicultural one does, too."

Let us recall that this is not the first instance in which we have seen such
a turn. In 1991, after accusations of harassment nearly brought down Clarence
Thomas, liberals thought they had found the magical weapon to take out
conservative males. After this, no congressional hearing was complete without
charges of "insensitivity" being leveled against politicians,
military figures, and nominees of Republican presidents. It was all such fun
that in 1994 feminists prevailed upon President Clinton to sign into a law a
provision allowing the prosecutors in harassment suits to delve deeply into the
defendant's past, seeking evidence of a pattern of swinish behavior. It was in
the course of the sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones against Clinton that the name
came up of a White House intern whose many visits to the Oval Office had caught
people's attention. Does anyone doubt that without Clinton's impeachment, we would be now in our
eighth year of the Gore administration?

In retrospect, this was an inferno waiting to happen, the moral debris of
more than three decades into which mischievous fate tossed a match. For years,
the Democrats' most effective candidates have been men from flyover country,
who positioned themselves as not-overly-liberal, and for a time it appeared
they might have come up with two. But Evan Bayh and Mark Warner took themselves
out of contention, leaving the field to John Edwards, a "person of pallor"
(as James Taranto has it) of the male persuasion and southern nativity, who is
still in the contest. But he is also, alas, a white southern pretty boy, a
high-maintenance dude who gets haircuts for what constitutes monthly rent for
his favorite voters, lives in a compound the size of a village, and was
famously caught on tape fluffing his hair up for four minutes, which defeats
the whole purpose of being a white southern male.

Meanwhile, the comic relief (Dodd, Biden, and Richardson) washed out fairly
quickly, and the two left standing were Obama and Clinton, each one a possible
First. For a year or so in which Hillary seemed to be cruising, things were
civil, until she hit a speed bump in Iowa.
And then, as she put it, "the fun part" began. In short order,
surrogates for her campaign were describing Obama in colorful terms, calling
attention to his self-confessed cocaine use when younger, his Muslim relations,
and his middle name Hussein, which (though given him in 1961) is the same as
that of a notorious dictator and murderous sadist deposed by American forces in
2003.

New York
attorney general Andrew Cuomo, son of the former governor, said Obama would
have to do more than "shuck and jive" if he planned to be president.
Billy Shaheen, Hillary's New
Hampshire co-chairman and husband of the state's
former governor, warned about what the mean Republicans would do with Obama's
drug use, in terms insinuating Obama had not only used drugs but sold them to
others. Then Bill Clinton himself boiled over, in a red-faced tirade against
the pretender. The rest is now herstory.

This sort of combined assault proved effective in combating Ken Starr, but
Starr was not an attractive young African-American man with a stunning family,
a message of hope, and a real chance of becoming president. People recoiled.
Obama's supporters fought back, and the only surprise was the Clintons' surprise that their offensive had
bombed.

There are signs now that both sides are trying to draw back from the
struggle, but the bitterness appears unabated, and the surrogates continue
feeding the flames. No one knows who will win the nomination of either party,
much less which party will win the election, but one can hope that the
group-think, identity politics, and hypersensitivity to criticism of recent decades
will burn themselves out in the bonfire. But this may be too much to ask.

All one knows now is that in retrospect it might have been better if the
first black and first woman to emerge as plausible national candidates had been
Republicans--and in fact, they both were. Colin Powell in 1996 and Elizabeth
Dole in 2000 were the first black and the first woman to be able to run on
something more than the protest or symbolic level, the first able to run on
their merits and résumés, who would have been taken seriously by voters and
analysts everywhere if they had been white and/or male. If Powell had run, if
Dole had run more successfully, even if they had run against one another--it
would have been something exceedingly different from the spectacle of this year's
Democratic primaries; a far more civil affair.

The reasons lie in the DNA of the conservative universe, which has a
different structure than that of the left. Republicans (conservatives
especially) more than Democrats define themselves by ideology--the objections
to Powell were based on what the right saw as his deviationist liberal
tendencies--and regard everything else as an afterthought. Republicans tend to
disdain appeals on the basis of victimhood. They are resistant to group-think
and allergic to identity politics. And their major donors and interest groups
are race and gender neutral--the right to life movement, the Club for Growth,
the National Rifle Association. The only ethnic lobbies they court are purely
local affairs (like Miami's
Cubans). There are no ethnic and gender spokesmen to deal with, no agendas to
speak of, no interest groups to appease.

Both sides are happy to see barriers broken, but for different emotional
reasons: Democrats are happy when barriers fall because they think it empowers
vast numbers of people, and it lifts the burden of guilt from their shoulders,
and brings new perspectives to government. Republicans are happy because it
frees individuals from unjust restrictions, reinforces the principle of
equality of opportunity, and means that many more people of talent will have
the freedom to realize their dreams. They would have run campaigns like the one
run by John Kennedy, not like the one run by Hillary Clinton, in which the
candidate's "difference" remained in the background, a factor, but
not the main element. Some people voted for Kennedy because of his religion,
and some voted against him for the same reason, but the number of each was held
to the minimum, because of the way that he ran. And after he won, religion died
out as an issue. Eugene McCarthy and Jerry Brown--men who had once studied as
priests--ran in 1968 and 1976, and this raised not an eyebrow. Joe Lieberman in
the 2000 election seems to have helped and not damaged Al Gore. Someday, the
appearance of nonwhites and women as candidates will arouse the same lack of
interest. That day cannot come soon enough.

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